Starting his career with a 6 year stint in the Indian Army, Jaideep Singh, who has now amassed over 15 years of experience in Strategic Planning, Business Development, Sales and Marketing, is the Sr. Vice President and Business Head of the Integrated Network Solutions Business at Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. INS as it is commonly called, works on creating large format Live Music/Broadcast properties & solutions across all media platforms of Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. including its Movies Business.
This great innovator, takes time out from his busy schedule to talk to the The Sherp and share his immense knowledge with us, letting us in on details of what we can expect from Live Viacom18 in the coming year, the secret behind the success of Vh1 Supersonic, plans for MTV Bloc Party, MTV Xtreme and a lot more.
Hi Jaideep, congratulations on VH1 Supersonic’s success! Will the festival be expanding this year? Any details you can clue us in on?
VH1 Supersonic in its first year has created a niche for itself as one of the most engaging Electronic Dance Music festivals in the country. Going forward we have a vision of having various extensions to the brand VH1 Supersonic – Goa across colleges, clubs with city tours culminating into the December Festival in Goa. We will also have the brand extend to multiple screens with the brand remaining alive through the year on television and digital assets of Viacom18 and on-ground through mid and large scale events across campuses and clubs.
What are the future plans for MTV Bloc party this year?
MTV Bloc party was a great format that we launched last year and is an important part of our LIVE calendar. We will surely look at launching the second season soon.
Judging from last year, which live property of Viacom 18 has been the most successful and could you tell us why?
We have curated around 12 properties across genres in a short span of a year with internal assessment parameters for each property evaluating the success of each festival. All of our properties have been successful on most parameters that we had launched them on and have developed a large community base in their respective genres. However, all properties cater to different genres ranging from Bollywood to Kids entertainment to Rock & EDM and are targeted towards a varied target audience and cannot be compared with each other.
For live events like festivals and concerts, experiential marketing is key as it focuses primarily on getting consumers to associate a particular brand with the experience they’ve had at the fest. For example – The Bacardi Buckets at the NH7 Weekenders. What are your thoughts on experiential marketing, and do you think it is a useful tool in bringing in the target audience?
Our view on experiential marketing is unique from what we have seen around and this is evident through all our recent properties across our brands like MTV,VH1 & Nick with each of these brands engaging with consumers across television, online and then on-ground. We are carrying the same concept across in our live business as well and believe that the brand experience has to come alive in all the stages of the property from inception to execution. We are therefore focused at providing a brand experience that comes alive on multiple platforms, starting from on-air platforms before the event finally leading into a final consumer experience on ground. That consumer experience then gets back on our broadcast and online platform providing brands a 360 degrees high impact consumer engagement opportunity.
For a festival like VH1 Supersonic, is there a specific international festival it draws inspiration from? (In terms of production/lineup and overall experience)
VH1 Supersonic has its own unique characteristics & facets, all of which are designed in-house. However, we have studied various festivals across the globe including our own international properties which have provided us important learning’s which we have incorporated into our events to provide unmatched scale and production value. However inherent characteristics and brand identity that is most integral to a festival is all decided by us.
Speaking of music festivals, you must have a favorite. Can you tell us which it is and why?
Personally I have had great following for rock and I closely follow all rock festivals. Internationally I think Tomorrow Land is a festival that stands out on scale and always has an interesting lineup.
Lastly, Apart from VH1 Supersonic, MTV Xtreme… what other properties can we expect from LIVE Viacom18, this year?
In a short span of a year LIVE Viacom18 has successfully launched around 12 plus properties across different genres. These properties along with the brand extensions of each make it a very large annual execution calendar for us. This year our focus is therefore to consolidate what we have built, widen community base and increase scale for each of our properties.